


The Music of a People

by AMarguerite



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Race Changes, Civil Rights Movement, Gen, Hippies, possibly some warnings for the KKK not being nice people to Freedom Riders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 06:16:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Who will not be slaves again!) In other words, the Amis as 1960s Freedom Riders, based on the Nashville college students who sang so many protest songs in jail that, apparently out of annoyance, the Birmingham police drove them back to Tennessee. For the Les Mis Across History ficathon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Music of a People

**Author's Note:**

> I realize the song ‘If You’re Going to San Francisco’ technically was written six years after the freedom rides, but it’s the song I most strongly associate with hippies, hence Jehan’s anachronistic strummings. I’ve also mixed up a bunch of accounts of various freedom rides for the purposes of a more dramatic narrative that can kinda-sorta-not-really align with the barricades and the whole ‘Do You Hear the People Sing’ motif from the musical. The Freedom Riders were an awesome civil rights protest group and I definitely recommend looking them up and learning how things really went down in Alabama in May 1960. Thanks very much to Pip, as ever, for betaing. Also I think I saw a thread on tumblr maybe a while ago about a Haitian Enjolras? I think maybe it was 10littlebullets? Enjolras is Haitian in this AU because the Episcopal church I go to is pretty heavily involved with non-denominational private schools for the poor there and the Haitian priest in charge there has the ‘hymn-like cadence’ Hugo ascribed to Enjolras. Apologies if I used someone else’s idea accidentally, I forgot someone else had the idea until I was editing.

“An’ then he had the _audacity_ to say I had emotional maturity of Daisy Buchanan,” drawled Miss Courfeyrac, waving around her cigarette. Feuilly was eavesdropping, fascinated by this long and clever story in possibly the undergraduate tradition. “And I said, ‘Oh honey-chil’ you are as dumb as a bag of rocks. You mean _Zelda Fitzgerald._ Is that the only person from Alabama y’know?’ Though of course it  _wasn't_ because Daisy Buchanan is one, a fictional character, and two, not from Alabama. She’s from Louisville, Kentucky. Some English major _he_ was! It was worse than th’time Grantaire drank two bottles of rum in an hour and tried t’proposition me in ancient Greek.”

The person to whom Miss Courfeyrac addressed her remarks was Miss Combeferre, a half-French, half-Vietnamese student who had defied all forms of institutionalized oppression to take a place first at Vassar, with Miss Courfeyrac as her roommate, and then at Harvard’s medical school. She faced every challenge with a mix of intelligence and competence that disarmed her opponents before they even thought to pick up their weapons. Five minutes conversation with Enjolras had been enough to convey all this to Feuilly. It had certainly disarmed Feuilly; he had only a high school diploma to his credit. He thought longingly of how nice it must be to already have one college diploma and to be working on a second. Miss Combeferre said, “I have often remarked upon this to myself, but did you know your accent grows stronger with your indignation?”

“Been aware of that since Jehan lead us all in stickin’ roses in the barrels of the National Guard’s rifles,” drawled Miss Courfeyrac, tossing her auburn hair over her shoulder. “Lord have mercy on me, were they _mad_ we didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I never was never less intelligible  in m’life than when I was tryin’ to get out, ‘One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war,’ while apparently simultaneously auditioning for a part in _Cat on a Hot Tin Roof_. Y’just wait until we get on that bus and Beauregard and I get t’talking as we cross the Mason-Dixon line, it’ll be like _Gone with the Wind_ with a more accurate sense of racial oppression and social justice.”

“Bahorel,” corrected ‘Beauregard,’ a star linebacker on the varsity team if Feuilly ever saw one.

Courfeyrac took a long draw on her cigarette and said, through a mouthful of smoke, “Y’re from Georgia, peach, you’re a Beauregard t’me until I see a birth certificate.”

They were standing before the Greyhound bus terminal in DC, in a clump. Feuilly was hanging around the edges of the Harvard –Vassar chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He had been offered a place with them by Enjolras, a Haitian American student who had organized their trip down and their ride on the Greyhound bus to the civil rights rally in New Orleans. Enjolras looked impressive and extremely handsome in the suit Courfeyrac had bullied him into, but Feuilly was used to poor treatment and unsure if even Enjolras, at the apex of professionalism, could ride all the way to New Orleans at the front of the bus. Feuilly looked again over Enjolras’s shoulder, at Combeferre’s neat and painstaking diagram of the seating arrangement. The goal was to challenge the non-enforcement of the Supreme Court’s rulings on segregation. Federal law stated that anyone, of any race, could sit anywhere they liked on the bus. The Southern half of the United States did not agree. In this particular ride, they would have at least one black rider in the front at all times, and seats with interracial couples scattered throughout.

“We can’t sit in the front when the bus goes through Alabama,” said Feuilly. His tone was questioning, he was begging to be contradicted.

Enjolras turned to Feuilly with the calm certainty of one who had grown up in a country formed from the only successful slave revolt in recorded history. “We can and will.” He turned to the other and raised his voice. “Courfeyrac—Combeferre!”

The two turned to him with an immediate snap to attention. Courfeyrac dropped her cigarette, and ground out the glowing end with her heel. “Shall we gather up the others, darlin’?”

Enjolras had scarcely inclined his head before the two of them sprung into action. Bahorel followed Courfeyrac as she glided over to Jehan and persuaded him to stop singing about the gentle souls in San Francisco, a place where one ought to wear flowers in one’s hair, and then to not to go into an acoustic guitar rendition of a very violent protest song of his own composition.

“Non-violence,” Bahorel reminded him, in a tone of vague skepticism.

“Folla th’example of your Georgia compatriot,” exclaimed Courfeyrac. “Ain’t Dr. King oddly controversial? Y’d think near two thousand years after Jesus, his teachings wouldn’t be so upsettingly revolutionary. I was surprised the FBI or the KKK—“

Combeferre had brought over Joly and Bossuet, who had been tasked with sitting together in the front of the bus through the Carolinas. Despite the fact that Bossuet had the greater cause to fear sitting in the previously forbidden front of a bus down to New Orleans, Joly was shaking with nerves. The flask they had been passing back and forth had done nothing to help him.

“Will—will the KKK…?”

Courfeyrac and Bahorel exchanged looks. They had observed the KKK from a distance, safely protected by their whiteness. They had bonded early, as the only two deep Southerners in Harvard yard, with the horrible, shared memory of burning crosses in neighborhoods far from their own, only besieged blurs from a car window, of half-glimpsed lynchings imperfectly hidden from them by their mothers’ hands over their eyes. Feuilly hadn’t seen it himself, but he’d seen enough newsreels to guess at their thoughts.

“I ain’t gonna lie, they ain’t gonna win any Miss Congeniality pageants.” Courfeyrac shook her head. “It’s the police we’re gonna hafta look out for, they got more at stake if we win.”

“Chances are we’ll all be arrested before we reach Birmingham,” said Bahorel, soothingly. He glanced at the other groups of freedom riders, most of whom were in their 40s and 50s. Bahorel was older than the rest of their group, but was still a student (albeit in his eleventh year). They were so young, in the face of so much hatred—Feuilly felt suddenly nervous.

Enjolras came over then, calm, composed, cool despite the mugginess creeping into the May air of DC. Everyone fell silent as he drew close.

There was a palpable confidence about him, springing from an inner certainty of self rare in one so young. He had seen successful revolutions against all odds, against all racial barriers, and it often seemed as if he had lived through the Haitian revolution personally. “It is possible we may be attacked in Birmingham. If we are, all the world will know. We ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.” His voice had the cadence of a hymn and this reassured Feuilly. It reminded Feuilly of church services and he had the impulse to shout out, ‘Amen!’ “ We shall not be moved, we will march on and ever on, and if they attack us, the whole world shall see and condemn them.  These are the odds I am willing to take in the cause of freedom.”

“And me,” said Combeferre, quietly, but certainly.

“An’ _me,_ ” added Courfeyrac. “Buncha stupid fellas in ruined pillacases, they don’t scare me.”

They certainly scared both Feuilly and Joly, but Feuilly was reassured by Enjolras’s small, reassuring nod, and Joly by Bossuet’s hand in his.

“Hey,” said Bossuet, softly, “you’ll be fine. You’ll be back studying pre-med before break’s over.”

“Combeferre will post bail as soon as they capture you, you have nothing to fear,” added Jehan, in a spurt of practicality. Jehan still had a black eye from his last anti-Vietnam protest, as he later informed Feuilly, but he adjusted his horrible mismatched paisleys with an air that denoted some misplaced pride in his appearance. Feuilly wasn’t sure if the flowers in Jehan’s long hair or the color of Enjolras’s skin would draw more ire once they reached Alabama—or possibly Courfeyrac and Combeferre’s gender, but the two of them planned to sit together and abide by the South's segregation rules in order to avoid arrest, contact the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and arrange bail for those who were arrested. Combeferre was good with money and authority figures; Courfeyrac was more schooled in the horrific nuances of segregation and could find someone to borrow a car from in any city in Alabama. They were a good team, as Courfeyrac hastened to reassure Feuilly when they lined up to put away their luggage.

“We don’t do this because it is easy,” said Enjolras. “We do this because it is right.” His gaze was penetrating; Feuilly felt as if he was being seen, truly seen, and being seen as everything he had hoped to be.

“Does everyone know their places for each stage of the ride?” asked Combeferre.

There were general nods and sounds of assent. Jehan tenderly packed away his guitar and watched with a sigh as it was stowed in the luggage compartment.

“You ought to be more concerned with—“ Feuilly began saying, but then stopped himself. He knew very well that the likelihood of attack was high, the likelihood of police involvement against their attackers nil. But that was why they were doing it, why all these students around him had planned so carefully, why Combeferre and Courfeyrac were dressed almost primly in their pencil skirts, pearl sets and cardigans, and had what seemed to Feuilly an absurd amount of money in their purses, why Bahorel was going to be stationed at the front of the bus, in a seat ill-designed for someone who could probably bench press four hundred pounds, and why Enjolras’s demeanor was so grave, why Joly and Bossuet silently clutched each other. They all knew the risks. They all knew they were wagering their lives to try and convince America of the wrongness of segregation, of the great truth once written, that all men were created equal.

 “We’re glad to have you,” said Joly, as they took their seats in the front. “Grantaire is from New Orleans and he was supposed to come with us, but he was too drunk to leave his room this morning. And the door was locked, so we couldn’t get at him. You’re from DC?”

“Yes. You?”

“Philadelphia, the both of us,” said Bossuet.

“Livin’ emblem of brotherly love,” Courfeyrac interjected as she passed by, to sit in the middle of the bus with Combeferre.

Feuilly was surprised by this. “Really?”

“Technically I’m French Canadian by way of Vermont,” said Bossuet. “I’m the only one of us truly a Yankee.”

“I’m a Yankee, had an uncle who lost his leg for the Union,” objected Joly. “You must forget that both he and I were born in Maryland, though I imagine, being from the tundra as you are, anything below Boston is 'south' for you."

Feuilly fell easily into the jokey camaraderie in his group on the bus. They switched seats often at first. He sat through Virginia with Courfeyrac, who flirted with him outrageously until she realized he was uncomfortable and then switched to a serious discussion of the Supreme Court decisions _Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia_ and _Boyton v. Virginia,_ federalism and anti-federalism, and the whole uncomfortable notion of State’s Rights when they stood in opposition to human rights. There was a very agile legal mind behind her drawling affectations. Then Courfeyrac went to tease Bahorel about Georgia, and Jehan came to sit with Feuilly. They talked music and, surprisingly to Feuilly, statistics.

Jehan gave a wide smile that caused his busted lip to split again. “It shocks everyone that I’m a mathematics major.”

“You don’t quite look….”

Jehan began dabbing at his split lip with his sleeve. “More bohemian than most statisticians, no? But flowers in one’s hair doesn’t increase the margin of error in one’s polls.”

It was near night now, and they split into more protective groups. Combeferre dozed on Jehan’s shoulder, after they had a quiet talk about probability, and Courfeyrac, abandoning her upper class airs and graces, flopped on Enjolras to sleep. Even asleep, thought Feuilly, watching Enjolras and Courfeyrac half-curled on each other, they had to revolt against social norms. 

The next day Combeferre sat mostly with Enjolras, talking of everything under the sun, but at the rest stop, moved to sit with Feuilly. She noted his interest in the medical textbook open across her lap and taught him much more than he ever hoped to know about the bones in his hand. When Combeferre and Joly moved to sit together, to quiz each other on the names of the bones in the human body, Feuilly sat with Enjolras, who had previously been talking in low tones with Courfeyrac and Bahorel.

“Bahorel will sit with you when we get to Alabama,” said Enjolras.

“Why—oh.” Feuilly had looked around the bus and seen the unmistakable hostility on the faces of the white passengers who had gotten on after DC, and the unmistakable looks of half-hidden anxiety on the faces of the other freedom riders.

“Will you still be up in the front?” asked Feuilly. “Perhaps—perhaps more to the middle--”

Enjolras smiled and squeezed his shoulder. “As the Chinese proverb goes, the wind may howl, but the mountain will not bow down to it. I will meet them head on.”

Feuilly watched them get into battle positions. Courfeyrac and Combeferre clutched each other’s hands as they sat in the middle, Courfeyrac’s vivacity subdued and Combeferre surprisingly calmer than usual. Joly and Bossuet sat a few seats in front of them, Joly at the window seat. When Bossuet had sat at the window, it had been pelted with rocks.

“Everyone’s a critic,” Bossuet had joked. “Just my luck, too. To be talking about Faulkner amongst his staunchest defenders.”

“You much exaggerate the literacy rate here,” Courfeyrac had replied.

Feuilly hunched in his seat next to Bahorel. They were across the aisle from Joly and Bossuet. Enjolras sat with Jehan in the seat in front of them. Feuilly had questioned this at first, but Bahorel had replied, simply, “Jehan’s knocked me out cold four times.”

 As it turned out, Bahorel had only been half-right about their pending arrests for breaking Jim Crow laws. They were stopped before they reached Birmingham, but they weren’t arrested. At the station in Anniston, when they had hunkered down in their bus seats like soldiers in the foxholes of the Great War, a group of white men, still dressed up from the mother’s day service at church, surrounded the bus.

“Aw _hell,_ ” said Courfeyrac, staring out the window.

“Stay calm,” said Enjolras. He didn’t raise his voice, but his tone carried. Feuilly stilled in his seat, though every impulse told him to _run_. In his experience, mobs of well-dressed white men never meant anything good.

The driver was in a panic; he closed the doors with an audible slam and raved up the engine. But they didn’t leave the station. There were frantic blasts from the bus driver’s horn.

Feuilly looked at Bahorel.

Bahorel’s expression was grim. “They’re slashing the tires.”

The bus at last began to move, but it was only to go far enough out of the station so that the mob could throw rocks and firebombs without disruption. The driver was knocked out cold by a flying rock and the bus came to a dangerous halt in the middle of the mob, now in a frothing fury. Feuilly kept away from the windows, as much to avoid the rocks and fire as to avoid seeing the faces of quite ordinary people distorted with rage and hate. He didn’t like seeing the world like this, he didn’t like seeing men turn themselves into monsters. The others were rushing about, trying to improvise some way either out of the bus or away from mob violence. It all seemed strangely unreal to Feuilly, a succession of noises and heat and images that surrounded him like a fog. If he didn’t move perhaps it wasn’t real, perhaps he would eventually wake up and _not_ be surrounded by people who hated him as sson as they saw the color of his skin?

Bahorel rushed to the door and flung himself bodily against it. He staggered back.

“Don’t try again, they’re holding the doors shut,” said Joly, tending to the bleeding, unconscious driver. “Combeferre, he’s still breathing but—”

“We’re on fire,” said Bossuet, bewildered into amusement. “What luck!”

And indeed, the back of the bus was on fire. The riders all rushed to the front of the bus, but the mob held the door shut, no matter how many of the riders pushed back. The heat was intolerable, the flames licking almost lovingly at the back row of seats. Feuilly, at the back of the crowd of riders, glanced at Courfeyrac beside him.

“Nothin’ like a warm welcome from the South,” drawled Courfeyrac.

Feuilly began to think that he might die.

Some girl broke from the mass of riders and grabbed Courfeyrac’s purse off of her shoulder. Courfeyrac exclaimed, “Well heaven bless us, Mary, what the hell are you doin’ here? I thought you weren’t coming with us, I thought you went back t’y’grandfather’s place for spring break—when did you get on?”

“In North Carolina.” Marie dug out Courfeyrac’s cigarette lighter.

“And… just what are you plannin’ on doin’ with that?”

“I’m going to blow up the fuel tank,” said Mary.

“… as you do,” said Courfeyrac, a little bewildered.

Feuilly looked to Enjolras. Enjolras glanced at Bahorel and, using Combeferre’s medical books, they began smashing the windows closest to the fuel cap of the bus.

“Good news,” shouted Bahorel, still cheerful despite the howling rage of the mob outside. “There’s already a gas leak. Throw the lighter from this window when you’re ready Mary!”

Seeing Feuilly’s expression, Enjolras said, “It will make the mob move back.”

“We need to get off the bus,” Combeferre agreed. She pushed her glasses up her nose. “Come on—press against the doors again and be quick about it!”

Feuilly was knocked off his feet when Mary dropped the burning lighter out the window. The explosion was deafening, he saw, in bright flashes, Combeferre’s glad cry as the mob finally moved back and door finally gave. They rushed out—and into the mob.

Feuilly was not sure what was worse, being trapped in a burning bus, or being surrounded by a howling racist mob. Blows seemed to come from everywhere and he was still half-deaf from the exploding fuel tank. He couldn’t tell where anyone was at first. Someone tried to drag him from the group, but Enjolras’s right hook stopped Feuilly’s assailant at once. When another tried to grab Enjolras, Bahorel barreled into him and knocked him into the ground. Feuilly was not fond of stereotyping and had merely assumed that Combeferre’s ethnicity did not mean she was magically gifted at martial arts, but as it turned out when someone tried to molest Courfeyrac, Combeferre was a tiny, vicious little weapon of mass destruction. With a move that seemed to defy physics, she grabbed the man’s arm, somehow swung up to wrap her legs around his neck and forced him to the ground viciously. Courfeyrac hastily pressed back against Feuilly and the two watched as Combeferre managed to fling men twice her size over her shoulders.

Feuilly looked around for the others. Jehan had been one of the first off and was surrounded. For someone who looked so gentle and still had wilting daisies in his hair, he was fierce. A group of men with chains and baseball bats couldn’t get him down, and when Bahorel broke into the circle too, the men quickly went on to find easier targets.

There was a shot. Feuilly jumped and assumed one of the riders had been killed. He looked around wildly for the others. Combeferre had taken advantage of her opponent’s distraction and kneed him in the groin. This was perhaps not a standard Vovinam attack, but it was an effective one. Jehan and Bahorel were still standing, though Jehan was bleeding copiously, the girl who had blown up the fuel tank had blood all over her face, but was alive and leaning on Courfeyrac, and Enjolras was taking advantage of the continuing shots to wrestle a baseball bat out of a Klansman’s hand and knock out someone trying to sneak up on Jehan and Bahorel. Joly and Bossuet reappeared as the mob retreated. They had been badly beaten and leaned on each other to stand.

Jehan spat out a gob of blood and squinted down the road. “Highway patrolmen.”

“Took them long enough,” said Bahorel.

“Now, now, we’re on Southern time,” said Bossuet. “As we know from Faulkner, that has little to no relation with our Northern conceptions of time. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Courfeyrac let out an annoyed ‘tch’ing noise. “Aw hell, that handsy bastard nearbaouts ruined my blouse. Combeferre, lemme have your cardigan before we get arrested. I used mine to clean up Mary, she’s got glass cuts all over her face.”

“Arrested? But we were the ones attacked,” Joly got out.

“Yeah, funny how the criminal justice system works in th’South. Despite the Supreme Court sayin’ buses and trains can’t be segregated, they still firebombed a bus that followed federal law. I'll bet y'ten dollars we'll be arrested for breaking Jim Crow laws.”

Enjolras, the only uninjured one among them, shepherded them together without seeming to, and somehow, in the confusion and fire and shouting still surrounding them, made sure they were all taken in the same police van. Feuilly suggested, very softly, that perhaps Bossuet and Joly should go to a hospital.

Joly overheard and shook his head. “None would take us. Combeferre can patch us up.”

“I’d rather not be separated again,” added Bossuet. “Bad things tend to happen when we are. I enter my newly fractured cranium into evidence, if the police bother to collect it. Or if Jehan needs proof for an ongoing scientific study.”

Jehan dribbled blood on him in response, and then attempted to brush it off with his paisley sleeve.

“It’s better this way, than if Courfeyrac and I were just left to post bail,” said Combeferre, as their little group, bleeding and battered, were forced into a cramped police wagon. “We’re together.”

“And we can annoy the hell out outta these bastards,” said Courfeyrac, cheerful despite the blood that had turned her auburn hair even redder. “Jehan, I know they burned your gee-tar, but I think now’sabout a good time for protest songs.”

Jehan croaked out, “We shall overcome,” before he succumbed to a hacking, bloody cough. Bahorel attempted to put an arm around his shoulders, but was hampered by his handcuffs.

Enjolras had a good, rich baritone and carried on. Even speaking his voice had a hymn-like cadence, he was almost mesmerizing when he sang. “We shall overcome. We shall overcome--”

Everyone else picked up the tune. “Some day!” Feuilly closed his eyes and sang as he had always sung the hymns at church, with more feeling than accuracy, but with a sense that here, in the swell of mixed voices around him, there was God and there was the force of good. The lyrics jumbled gloriously in his head. _We’ll walk hand in hand, deep in our hearts, I do believe we shall overcome someday, we shall live in peace someday, we are not afraid--_

One of the police officers banged on the wall separating them from their prisoners.

“Y’all gonna hafta listen to the people sing!” exclaimed Courfeyrac. “We shall not be moved, we ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around!”

They sang those two songs next as they were being processed at the station. Enjolras led them in ‘Go Tell it On the Mountain,’ and they went through all the songs they knew. Everyone was willing and happy to learn the spirituals that had given Feuilly the deepest comfort, and everyone cheered when Jehan was stable enough to lead them again through ‘This Little Light of Mine.’ When they were tired, Jehan sang hippie songs about herbs and flowers and the horror of war, or they listened to Enjolras sing softly of freedom in Haitian Creole. Feuilly was in a wonderful, elevated state. He scarcely noticed the jailors rattling the bars and when he did see the police officers look exasperatedly into their cell, he managed to provoke Courfeyrac, who had preserved most of her classical voice training at Vassar against an intensive smoking habit, into a version of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ that echoed gloriously throughout the cell.

This, at last, drew the police commissioner, Bull Conner.

“Would you just shut up?” demanded Bull Conner. “We had two bus attacks last night, we’re all tired.”

Courfeyrac looked him straight in the eye, smiled, and, with the air of one used to annoying older siblings, deliberately plugged her fingers in her ears and sang even louder. They all joined in at the chorus, and sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ again so loudly that they couldn’t hear what Bull Conner said when he came back again.

Out of apparently ungovernable frustration, that afternoon Bull Conner drove them to the Tennessee State Line, where the University of Tennessee chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee met them with food, water, and another apparently intolerable rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome.’ As soon as the little group of student Freedom Riders were out of the police cars, the Birmingham police had some other racial attack that they were in a great rush not to stop. The police cars were specks in the distance before they even reached the second verse.

“What happened t’y’all?” demanded the president of the Tennessee chapter.

“Everyone’s a music critic down South,” quipped Bossuet. “They burned Jehan’s guitar, apparently not liking his acoustic cover of ‘If You’re Going to San Francisco,’ and then were so displeased with our a capella group that we were run out of Alabama.”

“It’s a land without culture,” croaked out Courfeyrac, who had shot her voice after her third rendition of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ at _forte fortissimo_ (or, as Courfeyrac had called it, ‘blastissimo.’)

“How in the hell did they letcha outta there?” The president looked at them all in some confusion. “I mean, not unscathed, we’ll get all y’all to a doctor, but why in the name of God did Bull Conner let you go?”

Enjolras had a dry sense of humor; he said, mildly amused. “Bossuet is right. Bull Conner apparently missed his calling as a music critic. When he dropped us off, he said, ‘I just can’t stand their singing.’”


End file.
